Although the facts are continually in dispute, tradition has it that William Shake speare was born in Stratford in 1564, a child of the provincial middle class. He moved to London in the 1580s and joined the burgeoning world of the London theater, first as an actor and director, then as a playwright. Between 1588 and 1611, he produced close to 40 plays. Macbeth belongs to the end of Shakespeare’s “tragic period,” the years between 1600 and 1606 when he produced the five tragedies that are usually called his greatest work: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. Written and performed—perhaps coincidentally— around the time of the accession (1603) of King James I of England, who also happened to be King James VI of Scotland, the play treats the issue of royal succession and offers a rare example of Renaissance English ideas about Scotland.
The political background to Macbeth. Macbeth is set in mid-eleventh-century Scotland, a time of intense political and social transition. Around 500 C.E. the Scots navigated the 13 miles of the North Channel separating the northeastern Irish kingdom of Dál Riata (today’s county Antrim) from Britain and became one of five distinct groups of medieval peoples who occupied what is now Scotland.
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